


Built For Tough Battles

by thefourofswords



Series: Follow That Road [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, Curtain Fic, Dream Sex, First Time, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Masturbation, Phone Sex, Pining, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:35:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23977570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefourofswords/pseuds/thefourofswords
Summary: Adam nudges his shoulder, “He’ll find his way back, you know.”Danny blows out a breath. “I dunno anymore about that. The stuff he’s gone through in the last year...”“He’s had a lot go very wrong, very quickly,” Adam says. “I’m sure it feels like he’s slowly been losing parts of his family and when you reach a certain point, loss aversion takes over. It can make you do crazy things…”*Danny waits for Steve to be ready to come back.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Series: Follow That Road [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1816699
Comments: 60
Kudos: 388





	Built For Tough Battles

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't know I had this fic in me, let me tell you. In some ways it's one of the most ambitious works I've ever attempted. I'm not sure I've ever written this much in so short a period of time in my life. But after that disappointing finale, I had to make an attempt to reconcile the ending. 
> 
> Sincere thanks to turningterrific and joyfulseeker. This fic would not exist without them. They put up with all my crazy tense switches and comma overuse. And at the end when I was tearing my hair out, turningterrific stepped in and looked it over and told me I hadn't driven off a cliff.

**Steve** : This is supposed to be a romantic comedy. This is neither romantic nor funny. I don’t understand what’s happening.  
**Danny** : Okay, this is what they call the third act. They gotta come up with some goofy obstacle so that when they get back together at the end you get to feel all, uh, warm and fuzzy.  
**Gabby** : Can you guys save the running commentary for the DVD release?  
**Danny** : Now watch this, montage fades out and…

-Episode 4.04, A ia la aku (And On The morrow) 

****

Danny

Danny's not tryna be an asshole here, but a guy like him just isn’t that impressed with a big dick when he’s got one himself. From the moment he met Steve he could tell that he was used to big dicking people who got in his way. Every part of him announced it, from the way he snatched Danny’s case right out from under him to the way he recovered from that incredibly deserved sock to the jaw. Steve was harder, better, faster, stronger than almost 90% of the people they met, and for the last 10%, his smarts did the rest.

Danny had never met somebody who was so fucking gifted. It was deeply irritating that a man that good looking and that athletic was also sharp as a tack. And yet, if Steve thought he was gonna whip it out and big dick Danny, he was gonna get the surprise of his life, because Danny knew what he had in his pants, and he’d spent enough time in locker rooms to know it was impressive. 

But the more he learned about Steve, the more he observed his relationships and the way he couldn’t seem to help throwing lifelines to people, the more he realized that the my-bazooka-is-bigger-than-your-gun cockiness was a front. What was it their therapist had said a million years ago? All maladaptive behaviors originally served a purpose? Steve might’ve talked a good game, but underneath he was all heart. He believed in people. He saw their potential even when they couldn’t. Danny teased him about being a softy, but Steve was one of the rare gems who assumed most people were acting in good faith and would do the right thing in the end, even when he’d been given repeated reasons to think differently. 

His father and Doris (let’s not call that woman a mother) had practically bred him for a life in a warzone, and when they made their exit stage left, the Navy took up the slack, but still, whatever they threw at him, it couldn’t kill that generosity of spirit. But Danny started to worry after Catherine, and he got scared after Joe. By the time Doris turned up again like a bad penny, Danny was downright terrified. 

He’d long ago realized he was gonna have to start doing his own big dicking to protect him, which as a man perhaps more in touch with his feelings than most (shut it, ma) was not exactly the first thing he reached for in his toolkit. If Danny had been asked about his life prior to 5-0, he never would’ve imagined he’d be staring down governors and generals and a myriad of international criminal masterminds. But that’s what it took to protect Steve, and so that’s what he did. He doesn’t know what to do now though. The truth is that he doesn’t want to let Steve go, doesn’t understand even why he has to leave now, with Danny’s arm still in a sling and his lip busted. But he also knows he can’t big dick Steve down from this one. If Steve says he needs to go, then Danny needs to let him. Even though it hurts like hell. Even though it feels like an ending, no matter how many times Steve swears it’s not forever.

☂

Steve

When he’d first floated the idea of leaving it had been desperation problem-solving mixed with blind panic, but then he’d seen Danny on that hospital gurney, reaching for his hand as they wheeled him into the OR, he knew he had to go. Steve doesn’t delude himself that he’s doing this to protect Danny, although that is a blessing for a man who inherited too many enemies and made more of his own. But the larger part is that there’s an ever present pain in his heart now, one that’s gotten too hard to ignore. Being around Danny was a hell of a drug. His warmth and affection and judgemental rants that carefully hid how much room he gave people to be themselves.

Steve spent most of his life feeling like a tiger trapped in a cage they said was for his own good. He remembers the exact moment he felt the bars fall away. He’d explained completely honestly that he wasn’t calling him ‘Danno’ to poke at Danny, that it was a term of endearment. He hadn’t even gotten the chance to explain that every guy in the unit always got a nickname, that it was a way of establishing camaraderie and connection. 

“Okay. Do it every day, I like it,” Danny had said. And Steve thinks he meant it to come out sarcastically, but somehow hit earnest instead. Steve glanced over at his expression to check, and something in Danny’s face had made him feel like the entire world was expanding, like he finally had room to stretch. 

It had taken him longer to realize it was love, too long maybe, but by then he was hooked. He needed Danny like his body needed sustenance. And the realization had hurt. He had strangely felt like he’d lost something perfect. Maybe it was knowing in the span of two beats that it could never happen, that Danny was not interested in the same way. It had left him grieving, because he’d been here before, desperately in love with Freddie and unable to ever tell the truth about it, because Freddie was straight and couldn’t love Steve the way he wanted, and so he’d suffered silently, alone with his feelings through Freddie’s marriage, impending fatherhood, and eventual death. And he knew he’d have to suffer through it alone a second time. 

_I can’t anymore._

The thought had hit in the chapel, ordering God to see Danny through this. He couldn’t do it anymore. And Danny deserved better from him. Steve wished so very much he could give it to him. But he couldn’t anymore. Something inside Steve had broken. So much heartache over the course of his life, he couldn’t remember the last time it felt good to be him, alive in this body. 

And so his own throwaway solution floated up and caught hold of him. He needed to leave, because he couldn’t stop loving Danny, and loving Danny, which had felt so good and freeing, a shock of brightness through all the nightmares, suddenly hung like a lead weight. 

Steve hadn’t struggled with self-esteem often as a child or teenager. Or not as other people might describe it. He simply hadn’t thought of it. It wasn’t that Steve thought he was special or recognized his own value. He was simply fearless. How much could failure hurt? His mother was dead, his dad had had to send them away to keep them safe, he never saw his aunt and his sister, and he hated his classmates, and the climate, and the world. How much could failure hurt? His life already hurt. And so he’d been unafraid and undeterred. Stepping up to every challenge thrown at him, because that’s who Steve was at his core, a brawler. He was built for tough battles. 

Ben Keoki had said that to him when he was seven-years-old, and he’d backed Chelsea up against the older boys at the playground, despite the beating and ridicule it got him. 

When you’re raised to believe in justice—because for all his mother’s seeming cynicism in her last few years, she’d taught him to stand up for what was right just as surely as his father—so thoroughly, you’re never taught the skills it takes to make the everyday life worth living. He’d gotten his first taste of it when Danny had gotten so angry about Steve stealing his father’s case. Danny wasn’t angry that Steve was cutting in on his territory, he wasn’t angry that Steve had embarrassed him like that, he was angry because he was worried. He’d worried Steve would get himself and others killed. He’d worried about the tragedy of a slain hero cop’s son dying only days later. He’d felt _pain_ on Steve’s behalf. Steve had known he was still operationally effective, but Danny hadn’t known him then. 

Bit by bit, Danny taught him what it was like to live inside the wire. But he couldn’t change what had made Steve the man he was. Steve had to get on the plane.

☂

He suspects Danny had a hand in Catherine’s sudden unexpected arrival when he settles into his seat. It’s good to see her. He and Catherine were friends first, for years before sex ever came into the equation, and by the time feelings had been added in he’d known her nearly half his life. He suspects this is Danny’s last ditch attempt at playing matchmaker, because even though Steve’s hurting him by leaving so soon out of the hospital, that’s who Danny is. Loyal and invested to a fault.

“You think I was gonna let you go alone?” He could hear Danny’s outraged demand in his mind perfectly. 

Steve aches with how unworthy of it he feels, but also, he can’t live with this inside him and not give voice to it anymore. 

I’m in love with you. I want to fuck you. I enjoy everything about you, even your failings. And I know you love me like a brother, but I want to be able to touch you and suck you and fuck you so bad. But also I want the quiet moments. I want to be allowed to be messy around you, to hold you when you’re stressed and catastrophizing, but most of all, just to guarantee your company. There is no better person than you for me in the entire world, and I know this, but I also know I’m not your person. That you’d love me that way if you could, but you can’t, and it’s okay. Sometimes it takes a few tries to find the person you resonate with. Danny will find his person—he’s too incredible not to. 

He can tell that Catherine feels more strongly about this moment than he does. It’s in the nervousness around her mouth and eyes and the way he has to tell her to sit down. She looks like she’s two steps away from blurting out “I’m sorry” and “I love you” in quick succession, and he’s fantastically grateful when all she asks is “you ready?” 

And Steve breathes in. Breathes out. “Yeah.” 

He offers her his palm, and her lips quaver, because she knows him, and if he wanted what she was offering, he would kiss her, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from it, but she takes his hand anyway. 

“Do you have a plan?” she asks, because a flight to San Francisco isn’t out of the ordinary, but it doesn’t exactly declare what he’s going to do with himself. 

Steve nods once. “Buddy of mine in the 160th SOAR started a company that does rafting tours in Northern California when he got out. One of his guides got injured right before a bunch of tours on the north fork of the Kings River were set to start, so I said I’d step in.” 

“Those are class V rapids,” she says, laughing at him. “I love how that’s ‘taking a break’ for you.” 

Because he can’t help himself, he says, “That’s what Danny said, right before he threatened me with death and dismemberment if I drowned.” 

Catherine nods, but there’s something in her expression that looks too close to dawning realization. Steve clears his throat. “I’m crashing with Chin tonight, but my understanding is that it’s just a sofa, do you—”

“Oh,” Catherine says, suddenly looking both embarrassed and relieved. “I booked a hotel.”

“Oh good. Where are you staying?” 

“The Fairmont.” 

Steve whistles. “A fancy one.” 

Catherine shrugs. “Well I figured I might need a pick me up in case this went spectacularly badly.” 

“Cath,” Steve says, a sudden new surge of guilt rising in him. 

She shakes her head at him. “Steve, I get it. I really do, but you’re my family, you know? You will always be my family.” She squeezes his hand and then lets it go. “All things happen exactly as they should.” 

Steve wishes he could fully believe that last part, but he never has. The world is chaotic and strange and cruel. Looking for the reasons for that cruelty never solved anything. But there’s something comforting about her surety.

☂

Abby and Chin ask to take him out to Cotogna to celebrate on his last night, he’s had brunch with Catherine once, and they hiked out to the Presidio together, but Chin still asks if he should invite her or not. It’s odd to realize that maybe it wasn’t just Danny who’d become wary of Catherine now. He says yes, of course, because whatever else, it still means the world that Catherine was willing to take that flight with him, regardless of his answer to her, and through all the bottles of wine, good pasta, and laughter, it feels comfortable to be around her again in a way it hasn’t been in nearly five years. He feels good about that. He tells Danny that much. He’s not gonna thank him for meddling, but Danny should know Steve appreciated it anyway.

“You texting Danny?” Chin asks during a lull in the conversation. 

Steve looks up from his phone. “No,” he lies blatantly. 

“You are so full of shit,” Chin replies with a patented raised brow. 

“You’ve got that expression on your face,” Abby says. “The one that says you’re messing with him.” 

“I don’t have an expression!” he protests. 

Catherine says, “Hah! Yes you do, this ‘cat that ate the canary’ grin.” 

Steve may have also texted Danny “best italian food I’ve ever had” and a picture of his pappardelle with duck just for Danny’s inevitable outraged squawking, but they’ll have to waterboard him to get that information out of him.

☂

Danny

He doesn’t ask Steve’s permission because he’s a little bit pissed. But after all the effort he put into his place, it winds up making it easier to sell it, and if Steve didn’t want Danny to renovate his fucking ghost house, he shouldn’t have left Danny with the keys and his dog. It’s a marvelous piece of land, nobody could dispute that, but it’s also a mausoleum to a forgotten age, and Danny can’t help it, he’s done with it.

He starts with Junior’s old room first, making it a space appropriate for Charlie, trying very hard not to think too hard and too long about who helped him decorate Charlie’s last bedroom and who figured out how to put that stupid racecar bed together. This is just expediency. He’s sold his house, and his daughter’s away at college, but his son still needs a place to sleep. It’s easy to justify it. 

But then he’s moving on to the master bath, looking at updating the plumbing, because the water pressure is fucking miserable and the sink has no counter-space and all his hair product keeps ending up on the floor any time he tries to style his hair. 

He doesn’t think about the way he spends more money upgrading Steve’s bathroom than he did during his own home renovations. It’s not Steve’s bathroom anymore. It’s a fresh start. And maybe a little way of exorcising his hurt. 

Steve is gone. But he promised he was coming back. He promised. Steve is the one person in Danny’s life who never broke a promise. He does his best to hold onto that. 

He finds himself putting more windows in next, big bay ones that brighten up the front room and the master suite. It makes the small house feel infinitely larger. He does what he can himself, because he learned a lot from Steve when they were still working on the restaurant and Danny is nothing if not thrifty, but also because it frees up his brain from the worrying and the wondering, and most of all, the loneliness. 

He hadn’t expected that. He wonders if it would be different if Max and Chin and Kono hadn’t moved on. If Jerry hadn’t had his brush with death. These days he spends most of his nights with Lou, carefully talking about everything but the parts that need to be addressed the most. They talk about their kids, their epically tragic breakup, they talk about golf, and funny movies. But they don’t talk about the Steve-sized hole in their lives, or the way their perfect little Ohana had steadily moved on, just the inevitable march of time. Danny had always felt like he was battling the clock being a single father with joint custody, now it feels like he’s lost the race altogether. 

So he works on Steve’s house, remodeling the kitchen with a new backsplash and custom cabinetry. Next he puts in a breakfast bar, so he can actually sit somewhere that isn’t the counters. On a whim, he knocks out the wall to the dining room so that it’s one large space. He adds air conditioning, because Steve can tough it out, but sometimes Danny wants a break from the tropical heat. He widens skylights, repaints the exterior, and then when that’s done, he sets in on the stairs to the second floor landing. Danny wouldn’t say that he was building a blank slate in the hopes that it would make Steve come home, but that fervent thought could not be completely suppressed either.

☂

Steve

The North Fork is a lot of pissing in freezing cold water and dragging idiot frat boys out of tail waves, but it’s beautiful and peaceful too. His buddy Chris grew up on the Tule River Reservation, and Steve gets why he came back. His company, Sword and Dagger, is serious. Nearly all the guides and spotters are ex-military, and every last one of them has years of experience in whitewater conditions that make Steve look like a novice by comparison. He can handle himself, but it feels good to be a student again. After these last few years and all the horrible choices he’s had to make, it feels good to only be responsible for his rubber and his fellow passengers.

He’s never had much occasion to think about it, because it was never allowed to matter, but it occurs to him after his third night below freezing out under the open stars that actually, he really fucking hates being cold. 

He can’t resist texting Danny, the man of three million idiosyncratic preferences, about it. 

_How are you a real human?_ is what he gets in reply. 

Steve misses him so fiercely it hurts and for a moment he thinks, ‘what the fuck have I done?’

But he has a new routine now, working towards a new normal. He’s crashing in Chris’s spare room when they’re not out on the river, and he’s got a breakfast place he regularly hits up called Salles in Tulare. There’s a terrible looking coffee place called Big Kahuena’s that makes him laugh whenever he drives by it. He’s nostalgic for home, he realizes, a thing he’d never really allowed himself to do ever since he’d been shipped out to Carlsbad as a grieving, confused teenager. 

He sees how happy Chris is here, living most of his life on the river with his buddies, and how far away he is from that himself. He gets along with everybody, but they’re not his Ohana, and he likes the simplicity of just being outdoors, battling the river, but it doesn’t feel the same as hitting a flawless breaker and taking the drop. 

Mary calls to chat one afternoon right as Steve’s looking out over the incredible blue black water of Hume lake. He’d set out on a solo hike, because it was his day off and he didn’t know how to not keep busy. He sits on a rock, eating the peanut butter sandwich he prepared this morning, cutting the crusts off and along the diagonal without even meaning to, like he was making it for Charlie, and lets her voice wash over him. 

“Joanie’s new school is a co-op, and it means so much more involvement, Steve,” she rants at him, while he hums in commiseration. “I don’t know if I’m the only single mother they’ve ever met and they’re used to bored housewives or something, but I just don’t know how I’m going to do all that as well as work to actually feed my kid!” 

“What about the money from Doris?” Steve asks. 

Mary snorts. “I don’t want any fucking part of that. I’ll streetwalk before I use that fucking money.” 

He didn’t realize she felt so strongly about it and files that away for later. _That sounds like something **you** are gonna need to talk about,_ he hears inside his head in Danny’s voice. 

“I’ll move back into that crypt before I use that money,” she’s saying now. 

“What crypt?” 

She snorts. “The house, Steve.” 

Steve doesn’t rise to the bait. “You’ll be sharing with Danny, Charlie, and Eddie, then.” 

“That’s not so bad at all,” Mary says, “gives me some nice eye candy right at home.” 

“Now, I have to ask,” Steve says as gravely as he can, “do you mean the man, the child, or the dog?” 

Mary makes an outraged noise. “Gross, Steve! Obviously I meant Danny! Jesus.” 

Steve bursts out laughing. 

“It’s good to hear you laugh,” she tells him, and her voice is so warm and kind, it’s hard to believe this was ever his flakey frazzled younger sister who made bad choices like it was going out of style. 

“What if I came to help you out?” Steve says suddenly on impulse. 

“What?” Mary replies, clueless. 

“With Joanie. What if I came to help you out with Joanie?” 

Mary’s quiet for a long moment that almost makes him regret offering, when she says, “Oh, Steve, would you? Oh my god, that would be so amazing.” 

“I would, yeah,” he says. “I like it out here, but it’s really fucking cold.” 

She laughs and cheers and tells him to get his ass back to civilization.

☂

Danny

Danny has never had any interest in management or climbing up the ranks, but he let himself be dragged onto a government task force, and then when his Rambo-impersonator of a partner finally took a much needed vacation, he’d unhelpfully left Danny in charge of it.

“I hate this,” Danny says. They’ve been hit with three major cases at the same time, but they only have the manpower for one, even with Lincoln as a new addition to the team. It’s down to him to decide which ones they’re gonna take, and which ones they’re gonna kick to HPD. Steve had always made these decisions in the past, and he’d done it somehow without it ever descending into World War III, because everybody had a different opinion of which one it should be. Unlike right now. 

Adam, who’s standing with him as they watch Tani, Junior, and Lou bicker vociferously, laughs. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” 

“You’d know,” Danny teases. 

Adam merely shrugs. “When you offered me this job, I took it because it felt like a way to be close to her,” he says, his eyes looking off into the distance, and Danny knows he means Kono. “I always thought I’d be working my way back up the food chain eventually, growing a business.” 

Danny cocks his head. “And now?” 

“I don’t know anymore, do you?” 

Danny blinks. “Yeah, of course. I like solving problems.” 

“You and Steve,” Adam says with a smile that is 100% full of fond but incredulous judgment. 

“Do not compare me to that maniac!” Danny shoots back. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know it hurts,” Adam says dryly, because nobody has ever taken Danny’s poking at Steve very seriously. Adam nudges his shoulder, “He’ll find his way back, you know.” 

Danny blows out a breath. “I dunno anymore about that. The stuff he’s gone through in the last year...” 

“He’s had a lot go very wrong, very quickly,” Adam says. “I’m sure it feels like he’s slowly been losing parts of his family and when you reach a certain point, loss aversion takes over. It can make you do crazy things…” 

Adam _would_ know. His family dynamics were even more fucked up than Steve’s, which was both impressive and horrifying. 

“But, he’s also Rescue Barbie. He’ll be back.”

Danny lets out a surprised guffaw. “That! I am using that.” 

“Question is, does that make you Ken or Skipper?” Tani asks, breaking into the conversation. She looks triumphant, so Danny suspects her case won. 

“The fuck! Obviously not Skipper!” Danny replies. 

Adam and Tani both laugh way too hard. This is all Steve’s fault. Danny had wanted to retire and run a restaurant, and now he’s leading a small paramilitary force, being mocked by his subordinates, and getting screaming phone calls from the governor at four in the morning. 

He really had completely missed how much of the logistics Steve had been juggling all of these years, even if he was an absolute joke at paperwork and prone to taking off in the middle of the night on his own business. The first time Danny tried it without him there in the aftermath to explain it away, he’d gotten an ear-blackening from the governor’s chief of staff he wouldn’t soon forget. 

When he hears from Steve that he’s leaving King’s Canyon and heading south to spend some time with Mary, he’s enormously relieved. He made the mistake of looking up how many people died running whitewater rivers when Steve told him his plans. Finding out that it was considered the most dangerous method of travel on the planet (and that there were actuarial tables that said that every six minutes a person spent in a canoe or kayak increased their risk of death was really not at all comforting). He’d had to go after an old dead shrub in the yard he’d been meaning to cut down and remove for weeks and by the time he was done Eddie gave him a look that said ‘you okay, chief?’ so clearly Danny could only laugh. 

When they talk on the phone, he carefully doesn’t bring up Five-0, and Steve doesn’t ask. If he’s considering coming back, it’s not yet.

☂

Steve

Steve hasn’t spent a lot of sustained time with his sister since childhood, and it’s going to take a while to get used to each other again. There’s nobody there to make them play nice when they get into it anymore.

Aunt Deb left Mary her home in Pasadena when she passed, and there’s more than enough room for the both of them, but there are a million unfinished projects lying around, the fridge is an unspeakable horror, there are toys and boxes everywhere that he keeps stumbling over. 

“What? I inherited the mess from her!” Mary said when she let him in the front door and he first got a good look at the place. While Steve was sure this was, on some level, true, after all his Aunt had been the utter antithesis of his father, and Mary had been a rebel from her very first step, he has vivid flashbacks of returning home to find a similar level of chaos once upon a time. He wonders how long it will take before he stops thinking about every aspect of his life in terms of Danny. 

What becomes clear is that Mary might’ve severely undersold how well she had a handle on work and Joanie’s school commitments, so much so that he suspects she fabricated the excuse altogether to get him to come stay with her, but nevertheless, it becomes clear he has his work cut out for him just teaching Mary how to clean her countertops and do the laundry so that she’ll stop turning all of Joanie’s socks pink. 

“I used to get it sent out,” she explains mournfully. “But the detergent they used was bad for Joanie’s skin.” 

Mary’s finances are another mess and a half to get sorted out. She’s managing to get by, especially now that she doesn’t have to pay rent or a mortgage, but she seems to have no concept of budgeting, constantly overspending on clothes and toys and fun adventures for Joanie. 

“I just want to give her everything we didn’t get,” she says when he first gets a look at her credit card statements after helping to put Joanie to bed. They’re splitting a bottle of good vodka in the kitchen, and maybe that’s why he finds himself looping back around to that rage he heard in Mary’s voice over the phone. 

“We always had things,” Steve tells her, “what we didn’t get was a lot of praise and reassurance, and you’ve got that part covered. I don’t think this little girl will ever want for anything.” 

Mary’s eyes are bright, and she can’t hold his gaze. “I know, I know.” 

“You may really want to consider using that money Doris left.” 

“Never!” Mary bites out, dramatically fierce in a way that still takes him aback.

Steve waves a hand at her laptop screen and the budget tracking software he’s trying to wrangle. “She left it for you, it’s just gonna sit there, you might as well use it.” 

Mary’s voice rises. “Steve, you can’t even call her mom. What she did to you—” 

Steve blinks at her, confused. “Hang on, you won’t use it because of what she did _to me_?” 

“You think Danny and Chin and Kono and Lou and Jerry and Kamekona all didn’t have a thing or two to say about what she was up to? You think I don’t know how she acted? She was a rampaging crazy narcissist.” 

“But she was—I dunno if I’d go that far, she was still our mother,” Steve says. He hates how lost and unsure he sounds. He’s spent a lot of time very carefully not thinking about it too hard, because if he does he’ll have to feel the incredible grief of his mother dying not once, or twice, but in a way, three times, because the memories he’d had of her from childhood now felt like a lie. 

“Listen, I bought her spiel when she came back into our lives hook, line, and sinker. That she was heartbroken, that she’d missed us all those years, and I’m sure she believed it too, but now that I have a kid, I know that you don’t—you don’t do those things out of love. Not that way.” 

Over the years, his friends had always been very careful around his mother, even Danny who’d systematically torn the doors off of everything Steve tried to keep hidden, had tread very lightly around Doris. Hearing Mary say it now, so plainly and starkly, he wonders if that’s what he needed all along. He’d always felt so uncharitable judging his mother harshly. He knows the toll serving takes and the sacrifices it demands of family better than anybody. But. Her choices hadn’t really borne up in daylight. Danny would die before he allowed anybody to separate him from his children, he’d fought multiple battles to prevent that very thing from happening. Lou and his family had had a plan just in case his old demons came back to haunt him. They’d been prepared to go on the run together. 

“And she thought, what? That she could buy her way back into our affections after she fucked up again and again? No, she doesn’t get to do that.” 

“I understand the impulse, but—you know you can still use the money and be angry at her, right?” Steve says. “She’s gone. You can—” he stumbles over the word, “hate her all you want.” 

Mary sighs and looks away. “I don’t hate her, Steve, but...” 

She doesn’t need to finish the sentence, Steve more than understands. He loved his mother very much, but he was, is, so angry at her. He’s starting to realize that if he ever stops being angry, it’ll be because he knows it isn’t serving him, not because his feelings aren’t justified. 

“I know you have a tendency to feel like people offering help is them exercising a form of authority over you,” Steve says. “But it’s not. You don’t ever have to forgive her. Using it is not approval of her methods, okay?” 

“Okay, okay, fine,” Mary rolled her eyes, but smiled to blunt the force of it. “I hear you.”

☂

Joanie’s fancy charter school is near Kinneloa Mesa, which Joanie informed him very seriously was named after a fancy white guy who did some cool things and was obsessed with Hawaii, not unlike Steve himself. They’re having a bike to school day, with some bike safety training. Mary doesn’t have a bike of her own (“do I look like the sort of person who rides a bicycle?”), so Steve alters his morning run to pass by her school so she can ride alongside him as he jogs. It’s a thirty minute ride for an adult, by far the longest one Joanie has ever been on, and by the end she’s definitely flagging, peddling on her tiny little wheels.

Steve has learned by now that saying “it’ll get easier when you’re older” is the wrong tack to take when motivating discouraged children, so he cheers her on like she’s in a race. 

“Almost to the finish line,” he calls when the school is in sight. “‘And there goes the flying Joan McGarrett now, coming around the last turn to that final straight away. Will today be the day she sets a record?’” 

When they make it to the sign in front of school, she leaps off her bike, letting it fall to the pavement with a kiddish sort of panache that makes him laugh. 

“I did it, Uncle Steve, I did it! Did you see me?” she asks between deep breaths. “I was the fastest!” 

“You did, Joanie!” he says, collecting her bike with one hand and hauling her up onto his hip with the other. She grins up at him and he has flashbacks to running with Grace to get her prepared for her track meets before she got too cool to hang around her dad and her uncle Steve. His eyes prickle uncomfortably at the corners as he sets Joanie down, still in her pads and helmet, so she can wheel her bike up to her waiting teacher. He wishes he could trap this moment in amber, Joanie’s glee and Mary laughing at her own inability to figure out Deb’s washing machine, knowing that everybody left to him is safe and strong, and if not thriving, making it work. Steve had forgotten what that felt like. It’s been so long. Looking back, he thinks he really started to come undone when Danny was shot in quarantine and the only thing keeping him alive was Steve when the doctors couldn’t get to him. 

It isn’t normal to feel this way, like he’s barely hanging on. Steve has enough self-awareness to know that. The question is what’s he going to do now? He hates the thought of doing therapy, where it felt like he was forever scrambling to find the right answers, figure out what they expected or needed to hear, because Steve surely didn’t know. But standing on this street corner, breathing hard even though the jog had been in no way strenuous, he knows he needs help. 

He goes to his first veterans support group that evening after Mary takes Joanie up for her bath. He can do this. He’s survived liver failure, radiation poisoning, torture, countless broken bones, and more gun shot wounds than he really deserved. He can survive talking.

☂

Danny

Danny worried that Steve would go dark on him eventually, the way he had after Joe’s death and during the op in Mexico, but he’s pleasantly surprised when the weeks stretch on and Steve keeps replying. It’s unusual enough that when he stops by the lab for ballistics results, Eric mentions, apropos of nothing, that Steve’s been keeping in contact with him as well.

“You text with Steve?” Danny asks, brows raised. 

“Well, he never used to answer, but I guess he misses me, because he actually replies to the TikToks I send him these days.” 

Danny snorts. “God what are you sending him? No, never mind, I absolutely do not want to know.” 

Nevertheless, Danny takes Steve’s newfound electronic responsiveness and self-described good health with a grain of salt. Steve’s general recklessness had established very early on that he was not to be trusted. Funnily enough it wasn’t even the many, many insane things Steve had done on the job that had really cemented how dangerous that was, but rather the time he threw Danny an endzone pass with a recently dislocated shoulder just so Danny could get the ‘NFL experience.’ Steve would lie about his own well-being in the misguided desire to give Danny what he wanted. 

Which is maybe why, one evening, home late in the afternoon after concluding a tough case and so tired that his one beer goes to his head, he finds himself making a call. 

“Danny! Hi!” Mary says when she picks up. “It’s good to hear from you!” 

“Likewise,” he replies, heart in his throat. She sounds so happy. 

“Calling about Steve?” she asks, a smirk in her voice that Danny can hear across the airwaves. 

“Well, you know what he’s like,” he says. “He says he’s good, but—”

“But he’d say that even if he was on the brink of death,” she laughs. “Yeah, I know.” 

“Figured you’d give me the 411,” he says. 

“Well, I’m pleased to report that my maniac brother is doing great,” she says. “I dunno if he’s told you, but he’s started group therapy at the VA, and I think it’s been really good for him. You know when he showed up, he looked pretty rough. I dunno what he was doing out there on that river, but man I’m glad he left, because whew!” 

It’s a sudden sharp reminder how much Steve shielded Mary from his life, because when Steve had left he’d looked so exhausted that Danny was surprised he even had the energy to go. Not like his old self. He’d seemed to age so suddenly and so quickly. It felt like one day while Danny wasn’t paying attention he just stopped bothering to shave the gray stubble he’d been meticulous about for years, all because he did not like even the merest insinuation of being old. One of the only outward signs of vanity for a guy whose wardrobe seemed to consist of the entire wilderness section of an REI catalogue. 

Even Danny hadn’t noticed though just how dramatic a change it had been until he was looking back over pictures on his phone, and the smiling, happy Steve with his arms around Grace and Charlie had looked alien to him. He’d looked rested and tan and gorgeous, the perennially haunted look completely absent from his eyes. 

Mary is still chattering in his ear, and it takes him a moment to tune in. “When the server was flirting with him at brunch, he actually flirted back, haven’t seen him like that ever, honestly!” 

Danny has. On not entirely rare occasions. Steve has never made a secret of his enjoyment of sex, but it’s true that he was more inclined to shrug advances off, or ignore them altogether. 

“Well, I hope he got her number,” Danny says, unsure why he feels so weird in his middle, right behind his sternum, because this is good. This is really good. Danny had spent the better part of a year trying to fix him up after all. 

“His!” Mary says. “Steve didn’t ask, but the guy would’ve tattooed it to Steve’s forehead if he’d let him. It’s so nice, Danny, I can’t even tell you, to see he’s no longer on the DL about his sexuality.” 

“His sexuality?” Danny asks weakly, unsure if he’s actually hearing what he thinks he’s hearing.

“Yeah, you know. Being open about liking guys. You didn’t know that?” 

“I—uh, no,” Danny says, fighting every desire he has to hang up on her right now so he can call Steve and demand to know what this is about. Because how could Danny miss that? Nobody knew Steve better than he did. 

“Oh my god, I’m such a putz,” Mary babbles, “I didn’t—I just thought, of course you knew—I can’t believe he wouldn’t have told you.” 

“Nope, never said anything,” Danny replies, knowing the hurt welling up inside is audible in his tone. 

“Oh god, Danny, I hope this doesn’t change how you think of him,” Mary tells him. 

“Of course not,” Danny says immediately, “I don’t care about that, but what I cannot believe is that he didn’t tell me.” 

Mary sighs, sounding suddenly tired. “I thought for sure you knew. But, please don’t be upset with him. You know what it was like for him at the academy and afterwards.” 

“Yeah,” Danny says faintly. The pain in his sternum has become a sharp stabbing ache and his eyes feel hot, like he’s going to cry. “Listen, I gotta go, thank you for the update. Keep me posted.”

“Of course,” she says, “And Danny, feel free to call any time!” 

Danny says the right pleasantries, makes the right noises, and then he hangs up, wondering what the fuck just happened. Steve’s into men? He’d never gotten the smallest inkling. How could it possibly be true? Danny was a damn good detective, he’d chased Steve to the ends of the earth when information was scarce and resources even scarcer, he wouldn’t have just completely missed it. But Mary had sounded so sure, and it’s not like this was something you lied about to close family. Except for Steve himself, who’d apparently been halfway closeted the entire time they’d known each other. 

Anger hits first. Suddenly he’s furious. How could Steve think he would be the sort of person to care about this? It feels like such a colossal betrayal of who Steve should know Danny is. A rising desire to confront Steve, and yell at him for thinking so poorly of him, nearly overwhelms him and he’s halfway to dialing before he thinks better of it, thumb hovering over the button. 

He’d been gone when the case had come up, but Tani had told him about the poor kid who had to be saved from her parents and a conversion camp, and how she was a little surprised that Steve had fought for her so hard when he had little leeway to do so. Danny hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, because Steve could always be counted on to go to the mat for the people least able to protect themselves, but now he wonders. It’s not like he doesn’t know what they say about sailors. 

He takes a deep breath in and then let’s it out. If Steve didn’t tell him, it was for a reason. Possibly a really fucking bad reason, because Steve was known to get twisted up like that, but still, it probably had nothing to do with Danny himself. At least, god, he hoped not. He still needs to find a time to talk to Steve about this, because that’s who he is, how he processes, but it doesn’t have to be right now, right this instant. Danny can wait. Life as Steve’s partner on an island riddled with some very creative criminals had taught him that. 

Of course, all bets are off when his phone starts ringing and Steve’s name flashes on the display. Danny stares at the screen for one long moment, because he’s not sure he can have this conversation now without haranguing Steve, and he doesn’t want to be that person when Steve is doing so much better. Ultimately, Danny isn’t certain, but he’s sure that failing to pick up would send a message of its own he very much does not intend. 

“Mary told you,” Steve says when he answers, straight down to brass tacks, and then before Danny can even answer, “you’re mad.” 

“I—” Danny starts and then searches his gut. He thought he knew Steve all the ways there were to know him, and this cuts deep. It’s not anger, it’s pain. 

“Danny,” Steve says, and his voice is measured and calm, but Danny knows he’s pacing back and forth right now, a deep frown etched into his forehead. 

He sighs. “No, I’m not mad, just befuddled—”

“Befuddled,” Steve repeats. 

“Yes, befuddled, confused, aghast,” Danny says, aware there’s a bit of an edge to his voice. 

“Yes, I know what it means,” Steve replies, with an edge of his own. 

“Well, if you’d let me finish a goddamn sentence, I would tell you that I don’t care that you like to sleep with guys, but frankly, I’m really fucking hurt that you thought I would.” 

One the other end of the line, Steve blows out a breath. When he replies, he’s back to being calm, “Would you believe it was out of habit more than anything else?” 

Danny blinks. “What?” 

“Not to talk about it,” Steve clarifies. 

“You had openings to talk about it,” Danny stresses. “You know the kinds of things I’ve done and told you about. You know—what don’t you know about me?” 

“Danny, there’s a lot I’ve done that I haven’t told you,” Steve says, sounding both regretful and firm. “About my life before 5-0.” 

“Oh, so now your sexuality is classified too?” Danny fires back. “Why, huh? It’s above my paygrade to know intimate details about my best friend? You thought I couldn’t handle it? Tell me!” 

“Well, Danny,” Steve replies, mimicking his tone, “For a long fucking time, I couldn’t really do anything about it and then when I could, I sure as fuck couldn’t run around Coronado with a pride flag wrapped around my shoulders. And it…” Steve pauses like he’s struggling for words. “It wasn’t supposed to matter anyway.” 

“Wait a minute, are you ashamed?” 

He must sound properly horrified at the idea, because Steve laughs, bright and sudden, and the sound is so welcome and so familiar. Something inside Danny finally relaxes. 

“No, just,” Steve says, “there’s a lot of social pressure to marry a girl, get the house and the picket fence and 2.5 kids. And the people who were like me had to hide it. It just wasn’t an option. And until —” he stops up short, and takes a deep breath. “Well, it never occurred to me that that’s what my life could look like.”

“Okay, alright, I guess that makes sense,” Danny says grudgingly. It’s not like he doesn’t know what that’s like in his own way. His mom had asked him when he was going to get remarried practically the day after his divorce papers were signed. Everybody in his family always assumed that Danny would “settle down” eventually, even if he himself wasn’t so sure about that anymore. He had two beautiful kids, and he had Steve, erstwhile as he was. What would he even do with a wife? 

On the other end of the line, Steve is still talking, “—if I’d ever gotten serious with someone, of course I would’ve told you. But the idea of actually dating a guy didn’t even occur to me as a possibility.” 

Danny is somewhat mollified but can’t help digging in with, “Mary knows.” 

“Mary was a nosy kid who got into all my stuff,” Steve replies. 

Danny laughs despite himself. “She found your stash, huh?” 

“Yup,” Steve replies, somewhat ruefully. “I got better at hiding it after that, but brat that she was, she always found it again.” 

“Well you gotta wonder why she was after it so badly,” Danny says, chuckling. 

“I think we both know why she was after it.” 

The way he says it, both matter-of-fact and desert dry, makes Danny burst into full-blown laughter. “Sharing porn with your sister, that’s one for the books.” 

“Yeah, well, see?” Steve replies. “You are the only person on the planet who knows that now besides me and her, and certainly more than anybody I actually slept with, okay? So don’t be mad.” 

“I wasn’t mad,” Danny protests, “hurt, Steve! Hurt! Justifiably hurt.” 

“So don’t be hurt then,” Steve snipes back, and it feels so normal to talk with him like this that Danny felt like he was waiting for Steve to pull up in the truck and stride right in the front door. For a brief moment, he has to take a beat, holding the phone away from his ear. Eyes running over all the changes he’s made, the way the house is airy and full of light, he is swamped by how badly he wants Steve to see it. 

After a moment, Steve’s tinny voice calling his name jolts him back to the present. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.” He clears his throat, ready to say that he accepts Steve’s non-apology for the umpteenth time, when his own curiosity gets the better of him. “So you’ve—with guys?”

Steve lets out a soft chuff of air. “Yes.” 

“Uh, both ways?” Danny can’t help but press him, because obviously he knows guys, straight guys and gay guys both, who like a little action up there, but he’s never had much of a chance to ask about it without sounding like an asshole. 

Steve sounds genuinely amused now, “Yes, both ways.” 

“Well, good to uh—know,” Danny says. He catches his own face in the mirror he’s hung in the newly rearranged living room, a little red cheeked and wide-eyed. Maybe it’s that he didn’t really expect Steve to say yes. Steve does not seem—well he doesn’t look like—not that he knows what that looks like, or should assume. He can hear his own daughter going, ‘ugh, quit being so heteronormative, Danno,’ with that late teenage disdain. 

“I’m sure you’ll do something very productive with the information,” Steve says, dry tone back in force. 

Danny ignores him. “I’m glad I know.” 

The way Steve says, “I am too,” settles somewhere warm and deep inside him, the pain behind his sternum finally faded.

☂

Steve

When Danny hangs up, he practically collapses to the grass in breathless relief. He’s shaking. Danny took the explanation and was willing to let it go. How could Steve say, ‘I couldn’t tell you, because then you’d know I was in love with you, and maybe then you wouldn’t have wanted to be my partner.’

These last 20 minutes felt about as high stakes as any op he’d planned down-range. And he’s going to have to apologize to Mary now too, for what happened when she told him.

One of the first projects he started on when he moved in was to try to declutter the backroom into something usable so that Mary could do her artwork somewhere that was not the living room, or the dining room table, or on one memorable occasion, the rug in the hall. He’d put up shelving and gotten bins for all of Joanie’s toys, which he’d then carefully labeled, because in the times he’d dropped off Charlie he’d gotten a chance to look at what Rachel had done. After that he’d rigged an art storage rack out of the extra lumber so that Mary’s canvases and watercolors had somewhere to go, but Mary and Joanie seemed to thrive in barely contained chaos, and they weren’t helping. 

So when Mary came in to tell him she accidentally outed him to Danny, he was already keyed up. He’d whirled around in horror, only to come down hard on a stray doll, nearly wiping out as it rolled underfoot. 

“Jesus, Mary, what the fuck? I’m trying to meet you halfway, and you clearly don’t give a shit,” he’d snapped in a way that was uncharacteristic for their relationship these days. Anger was a weapon of a sort, and this hadn’t been the most effective use of it. But he hadn’t had time for that. He’d needed to talk to Danny before he could let it simmer and fester into the hard rage he knew Danny was capable of. 

“I’m sorry, Steve, I’m really sorry, but Danny’s fine, I swear. He was surprised, but he swore it was okay.” She’d looked sheepish and scared, her big eyes wide in her face. 

“You just—ugh,” he’d replied, “I can’t with you right now.” 

No matter what Danny had said, he was not okay. And how could he be? If Steve found out Danny had lied to him about something of this magnitude he would’ve blown a gasket. 

It had taken him a while to track down his cell-phone in the house, because he no longer reliably kept it on his person now that he didn’t have to worry about 5-0, and Joanie liked to use it to play games, so it could turn up in any number of places. As soon as he’d found it, he’d rushed out into the front yard, heart in his throat, bracing himself for a conversation he hadn’t been ready to have. 

But Danny does seem okay now. If he’s furious at Steve still, he’s hiding it pretty well. 

What Steve told him hadn’t all been lies. He hadn’t recognized it at the time, but he’d fallen harder than a bag of bricks when he met Danny. And up until Steve had been willing to know that about himself, he’d never once considered life with a man. Even now there’s still a large part of him that simply doesn’t know how to talk about this, especially with the great love of his life just at his fingertips and yet somehow out of arm’s reach. He can’t imagine going out and telling anybody else after this either. When he hooked up with guys, he didn’t bother to say, ‘hey I’m bisexual, or, flexible, or queer, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, wanna fuck?’ The wanting to fuck part was generally understood without requiring anything else. 

To a closet romantic like Danny it sounded crazy, but until moving back to O’ahu, the only actual relationship he’d had was his high school girlfriend. For years, he’d subsisted on a lot of casual sex. Sometimes it turned into a thing, maybe they’d go out to dinner before sleeping together when he blew into town, but those people had rarely been on his mind when he was away from them. He’d been happy with that. It was easy, everybody always understood where they were at. 

And then came Catherine, and later Lynn, which hadn’t actually had much to do with what he actually wanted or needed. They’d been fun, he’d cared about them as much as he could, but these were roles to fill, not real relationships. Joe had wanted him to make an honest woman of Catherine for years, and everybody was coupling up—Kono, Chin, Danny, Max. Steve felt like he had so much to prove, that he wasn’t completely damaged by his parents or the way they died. Of course he hadn’t known that’s what he was doing. What is it that his and Danny’s therapist used to say? All maladaptive behavior arose to meet a need. 

It wasn’t until that ill-fated couples vacation with Lynn and Melissa, right in the middle of that yoga class they dragged him to, that he started to get an inkling at just how performative the relationship was. In that moment, lined up on their mats the grass, all he wanted was to be with Danny, even if it was following him around while he dealt with the little twerp and his sunglasses. So he’d pretended he couldn’t hold a simple three-legged downward dog and booked it. Lynn was smart enough to know that was absolute bullshit, but never called him on it. Upon mature reflection, all these years later, he suspects that was probably Danny’s own attempt at relationship sabotage. What a fucking mess. 

And now here he is, sitting out in the damp grass, straining for the rolling sound of waves that aren’t there. He misses being able to walk out his back door and dive into the ocean and let his cares wash away, losing himself in the water where he was both part of something huge, and entirely alone. And while there are plenty of pools in the neighborhood he could hit up, it would only be another pale imitation of what he actually wanted, and he’s done with that. 

He pushes himself up to his feet, and turns around to head back into the house and take his lumps for being such an asshole. 

When he gets in, he finds Mary and Joanie tidying up while listening to The Beatles’ Rubber Soul. It brings back faded memories from childhood of doing the household chores on the weekend, Mary in her bassinet, Steve fluffing the pillows, singing with Doris as loud as they possibly could to be heard over the sound of the vacuum.

“‘Baby you can drive my car,’” Joanie sings along, jumping up and down on the couch, “‘Yes, I’m gonna be a star!’” 

Mary flicks off the vacuum and comes to join her, hoisting her up off the couch with a whoop, and then there they all are, dancing and shouting “ ‘Beep Beep Beep Beep Yeah’” at regular intervals. When the track changes to Norwegian Wood, they all sag down on the couch, Joanie sprawled across them both, her head in Mary’s lap, and her bare feet propped up on Steve’s. 

“Thank you,” Steve says, catching Mary’s gaze. It’s no small thing that she tried to clean up a little. “And I’m sorry.” 

She reaches out to grab his hand. It’s the happiest he’s felt in a long while.

☂

Danny

_Fingertips at his waist, gentle but steady, holding him still as he stands in the surf, pressed chest to chest, water rushing in and out around them. He looks up and he has to tilt his head back to meet Steve’s eyes. In the blazing sunlight they’re a perfect crystalline green, like they were lit up from within. Everything feels calm, but there’s also a wild exhilaration in his chest. He loves, he loves, he loves…_

Danny jolts awake with a jerk to find himself in Steve’s bed (really, it’s his now, because he upgraded from that horrible piece of cardboard Steve called a mattress on week four of Steve’s California sabbatical). It’s still dark out and his heart pounds hard in his chest, but not like he’s scared, more like he took a really intense but rewarding run and can finally stop to breathe. The pressure in his bladder forces him out of bed to take a piss in the en suite. What a weird fucking dream. He must’ve had Steve’s revelation on the brain. 

One unfortunate aspect of adulthood they never warned Danny about was the truly horrifying array of people he might have uncomfortable and bizarre sex dreams about. He’d had one about Toast and this weird merry-go-round thing that was so anxiety-inducing he’d actually woken himself up and had to spend the next several hours trying to cleanse the imagery from his brain. 

But this one was good, sun and sand in all directions, cool skin pressed together. Danny rarely felt that all-encompassing sense of satisfaction in his waking life. There were things that made him overwhelmingly happy, but blame his pessimism, Danny always knew the end was on the horizon. His marriage to Rachel, his time in Jersey, his kids as they grew older—but funnily enough never Steve. Maybe that’s why it psyched him out so badly when Steve announced he needed to go. Danny wanted it for him, but he hadn’t—he hadn’t been able to prepare himself for it, because he never thought it would happen. 

Catching his own suddenly distraught expression in the mirror as he washes his hands, he has to shut the tap off and take a deep breath, holding onto the sink with a white-knuckled grip. There’s a yawning hole in his chest that reminds him of how he felt when he first got divorced.

After a long moment, he rubs his eyes, exhausted and sad, and slowly pads back to bed,

☂

_A thigh moves between his legs, pushing, pressing, easing the ache in his dick. Fuck he’s hard. Has he ever been this hard? This desperate? The thigh flexes, followed by hips against Danny’s. Danny doesn’t know how he can simultaneously feel what’s happening and see it like he’s on the outside. There he is backed up against a wall, Steve leaning against him, his forearm braced on the plaster next to Danny’s head, while Danny looks up at him with a fierce expression. They look like they fit._

_The soft susurrus of breathing drifts across his collarbone where the neck of his t-shirt has been pulled wide and then he’s back in his body. Danny is on fire. He clutches Steve’s worn soft polo in his fists and drags him down closer so he can kiss him. It’s glorious. Which feels so fucking imporant, because Danny loves kissing._

_Steve pulls away to whispers against his jawline, “Not a surprise with that motormouth.”_

_Danny lets him get away with it just this once, because he feels so good, both relaxed and amped up at the same time. It’s almost like being high, even though it’s been a long damn time since he last experienced it. Steve is long rangey muscle below his palms, skin hot even through his clothes, and the way he shifts against Danny when he draws a line just to the right of Steve’s spine tells him he’s found a sweet spot._

_“Lemme fuck you,” Danny says, “god please, let me fuck you.”_

_Steve flashes that quicksilver bright grin and Danny loses sense of time, but when he comes back to himself, he’s holding Steve’s wrists to the sheets, thrusting in between his thighs, and Steve cries out with every stroke inside, quads trembling like they’ve been at this for a while, and Danny doesn’t know how he knows, but Steve has come already, and Danny’s fucking him well into over-stimulation, but Steve, crazy as ever, only pushes back into it._

_Danny’s close. He’s almost there, although it feels like he’s been on the edge of ‘almost there’ for millions of years._

_“Tryin’ to make me feel it tomorrow, Danno?” Steve says, wildfire flashing in his eyes. And Danny isn’t, he just wants this to last, simultaneously needing to come like he needs to breathe and hoping it never happens, so he can stay right here. Right fucking here where nothing has ever felt this good. Steve breathes out a breathless taunt, “Try harder.”_

_Oh fuck, why does that get him where he lives. But now he’s gonna—_

The horrible buzzing vibration of his phone on the nightstand makes him jolt awake, pleasure dissipating instantly like being doused with a bucket of water. The clock says 5:47 AM. He tilts the screen of the phone towards him to blearily and curses. Work. He can’t try to sink back into sleep, and get the ending he desperately craves. He punches the pillow once and then rolls out of bed with a creaky groan. 

Looking down at his morning wood awkwardly jutting up in the confines of his boxer briefs, he mutters, “Fuck.” 

☂

Somewhere in the lull between home renovation projects, and Charlie taking a four day weekend with Stan, Danny falls down a rabbit hole. There were two things a detective really needed, a strong sense of curiosity, and a high degree of empathy (“No, you maniac, I don’t mean ‘kumbaya shit,’ I mean being able to put yourself in somebody else’s headspace!”).

Which is how he finds himself watching gay porn. Research. Trying to figure out what it might be like for Steve, who’d clearly been repressing this side of himself for decades. It was important to understand what was going on in that monkey brain of Steve’s that it took him leaving to feel comfortable being open about it. 

Okay no, Danny can’t lie to himself. He does very much want to understand that, because Steve’s explanation aside, it worries him, but that is not at all why he’s looking up porn on the internet. 

He’d liked that dream a little too goddamn much, and finding out his best friend was into men immediately followed by dreaming about frankly earth-shattering sex with him felt like it probably meant something. Which is to say, he hadn’t started with the porn, okay. There had been a couple of steps in between. 

First he’d looked into the psychology of sex dreams. All of the (fairly shady) resources he dug up said that sex dreams were rarely about a hidden desire for sex with the subject, but then they’d followed it up by saying it was more likely about a desired psychological connection. That seemed unlikely. How much closer could he psychologically get to Steve without giving him half his brain? What’s another organ, he thought hysterically. 

One website suggested that he try to think back on the dream and think of the first three adjectives that came to mind. So, hot, desperate, and illogically fulfilling? How promising (not). Then he scrolled down the page further to add insult to injury with the sentence, “These three adjectives likely describe your innermost feelings toward the subject,” and wanted to throw his laptop out the window. None of this made sense to Danny at all. 

The last few years brought so much upheaval and disarray. It isn’t even all that long ago that he and Rachel had once again fallen into bed. Then there was the horrible, horrible day with Leslie that would haunt him until he died. 

It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that his subconscious was reaching out to something safe. What was it their therapist had said? That their relationship was actually very healthy for all that it was unconventional, because they were clear and open lines of communication and there was room for everybody’s emotions. 

“There’s a high degree of verbal invalidation that I think you should address, but it appears that in some ways it’s not all that impactful.” She’d smiled at them. “Almost like play acting.” 

They’d both dismissed that out of hand of course. They were definitely not play acting those heated arguments. But Danny also knows they’d never once taken those arguments home with them. For all that Steve scoffed at him, and for all that Danny had to remind him to act like an actual person and not a war criminal, there was a real lack of judgment. Danny had done bad things. Sometimes he wondered if he was really a good guy and Steve always told him, “I’m not sure I am one either.” In some ways they were government-funded vigilantes, not cops. And for all that Danny hurts that Steve left, he knows that there’s no resentment between them.. Things that had _never_ been true of any of his other relationships. He supposed the psychological connection thing could be true in the sense that Steve was second only to his kids in life, and now he was gone. 

The only problem with the hypothesis was that damn first adjective: hot. Steve being bi couldn’t just reflexively make him bi too, which could only mean...

He already was. 

Steve said a relationship with a man never really occurred to him, and when Danny thought back to being an adolescent and a teenager, it was sort of the same. Being attracted to men wasn’t allowed, and so he’d simply ignored it. With all the social conditioning and societal expectations, especially around his chosen profession, it hadn’t even been all that hard. He liked women. Women liked him. He didn’t have to look at anything else too closely. 

Which is how he finds himself on pornhub, testing a theory, as Jerry might say, and in the process learning about otters and bears, twinks, and gym bunnies. He is not pleased to see that the step-father dynamic all over straight porn persists here as well. It wasn’t...all that stimulating, honestly, but Danny’s always been picky about porn. The artificialness of it. The biggest difference that he sees really is that he’s not used to men’s voices loudly moaning and dirty talking so much, which, he can readily admit, is hot. It’s not like there isn’t a lot of dick in straight porn. It’s not like he doesn’t prefer the guys to be well-built. He’d always assumed that was because there was something sort of tragic about these porn stars having to suffer the attentions of Ron Jeremy types. But also he can see how the visual appeal possibly, probably had a lot more to do with it. 

All those times he’d yelled at Steve for stripping off his shirt, or walking around his own house half-dressed in the middle of the daytime hadn’t been about propriety. Steve had written it off as his stayed mainlander ways, but Danny suspects the awkwardness was actually born out of feeling like he shouldn’t be looking, because he’d been attracted to him, and hadn’t wanted to face it. Danny puts his face in his hands and groans. 

He never enjoys looking back through his own relationship history where he always finds lots of places to blame himself, but in this new context it looks even worse. The way he’d waffled around introducing Gabby to Grace, and then about saying the L word, or telling her to stay. The way Melissa had demanded outright if he loved her and he’d held the line that he couldn’t tell her that. It would’ve been so easy to just end that fight with what she wanted to hear. She was hot and fun and she got along with Grace, but the relationship was like junk food. He’d thought for a long time that he couldn’t commit, because he’d been burned so badly by Rachel, but...

God, if Steve had been a woman, it would’ve been plain as day. Giving him that much hell, and with such confidence, he would’ve been sunk from the moment he told Steve the acceptance to his apology was pending, and Steve had said, “You let me know now.” It had sounded oddly salacious, even at the time, but he just hadn’t wanted to interrogate that. 

Well. In the long game of one upmanship between them, Danny thinks he’s won this round. Because Steve might be into men, but Danny is into him, and what is he supposed to do with that now?

☂

Steve

More and more after the night of his phone call with Danny and that fervent wish for the ocean, Steve misses home. He understands why people love LA. There are a million cool and obscure museums and bookstores. When he was stationed out of Coronado he hadn’t come up here much, he hadn’t had the free time. But Steve loves the outdoors, and while the mountains have their own beauty, the desert scrubland definitely doesn’t do it for him, Griffith Park is crowded, with zero place to park, with air pollution regularly choking up the skies. Neither does have a lot of use for art. 

Joanie has a sleepover one night, and Mary threatens to drag him to an exhibit showing John Wayne Gacy’s art so that he’ll be able to appreciate it more. 

“Wait, is that a thing?” he asks her.

“Oh yeah, at the Museum of Death,” she tells him. 

“The museum of death,” he repeats. 

She laughs at him. “No not like a pulp horror novel, think of it like the Museum of Sex in New York, only for death.” 

Steve hadn’t known there was a museum for sex either. “And they have John Wayne Gacy’s art?” 

“They have the largest collection of serial killer art in the world,” she says. “It’s pretty cool. His art isn’t so good though. Lots of clowns.” 

Steve furrows his brows. “You’re joking, tell me you’re joking.”

“Nope, not joking,” she tells him, “but we are going out tonight.” 

“Oh, ‘we’ are?” he says with narrowed eyes. 

“I have a show tonight, and you’re going to come and pretend you like my work,” she tells him. 

“The sleepover was a trick.” He makes a dramatic horrified gasp, and when he sees her smile, he asks, “But, Mary, why didn’t you tell me you had a show?” 

She bites at her lip. “Well, aside from Joanie who can’t really appreciate it, I’ve never had family at one of my shows. I didn’t know if they’d even accept my pieces until a few weeks ago.” 

His eyes soften, and he feels like he failed her all over again. “Then go we must.” 

They get Mexican for dinner before going to the opening at a gallery in Glendale filled with people holding cans of Tecate instead of fancy glasses of red wine. He can’t tell if the unpretentiousness swings back around to pretentious again, or if it really is a good attempt at deconstructing the traditional gallery space. 

“Look out, did you just make a critique?” Mary teases when he brings it up. “Have you been to lots of art shows while I wasn’t looking?” 

Steve gives her a sheepish look. “Undercover a couple of times, mostly I got Kono and Chin to do it though.” 

She laughs and grabs him by the elbow. “C’mon, my stuff is over there.” 

As soon as they reach the corner he knows exactly which ones are hers. Set against a simple black frame is a charcoal drawing of Danny, standing in profile up against the bare boards of a wall before the sheetrock goes up, his arms crossed and chin tilted up. Breath catching in his throat, he can’t look away. He knows exactly when she must’ve drawn it; she’d been in town when they were just getting started on the restaurant and they’d taken her to see the prospective space. Steve said something Danny hadn’t liked, and he’d crossed his arms and rolled his eyes up to the ceiling, like he was begging heaven for answers. Mary laughed at them both. Fairly typical Danny. In the drawing though, with his expression frozen in that moment, it looks daydreamy and young, rather than standard annoyed-at-Steve face. 

“How?” he asks. 

She rolled her eyes. “You guys started arguing and stopped paying attention to me.”

The other works are a little bit different, with bright washes of color to offset a few smaller charcoal drawings, one of which is a more loosely rendered one he recognizes as himself as a much younger man, looking down at his hands as he unbuttons the coat of his dress whites. 

“The day you graduated the academy,” she says and it makes him swallow. They hadn’t been getting along then at all. She’d had some idea of moving out of Deb’s and getting an apartment for them both in San Diego, and at 22, ready to ship out for his first tour, he’d been so emotionally closed off he hadn’t known how to let his seventeen-year-old sister down easy. He’d simply said no, hadn’t even explained that it wasn’t even his choice, and then gotten out of there when the yelling started. It’s funny, in both drawings she’d captured something incredibly vulnerable about them both. 

He loops an arm around her shoulder and draws her in tight, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead. “That drawing is 20 years old?” he asks. 

She shakes her head. “God no, I wasn’t any good 20 years ago.” Steve would debate that, but they’d just get into another round-and-round argument about it. “It was off a photo Aunt Deb took, I found it after she passed and I was going through her things.” 

He nods, touched. 

“So,” he says finally, “you, have a crush on Danny.” 

“Shut up,” she replies with a laugh, face caught in a torrid blush. Then, still red-cheeked, she turns her whole body towards him, like she’s about to tell him something big. “We McGarretts are predictable that way.” 

“How long have you known?” he asks. 

She snorts. “That you’re obsessed with each other? Uh, day one.” Her voice softens. “That you’re in love with him? A few days ago, watching you pace around in the yard on the phone.” 

Steve exhales. It feels good to have it out there, like it’s not some dirty secret that’s steadily choking the life out of him. She grabs his hand and squeezes it tight. 

“When you leave us,” she says, eyes bright like she might cry, “please remember that you are my beloved big brother, and you deserve good things.” 

Steve hugs her close again. “You too, Mare.” 

After that he makes her talk to the patrons coming around to ooh and ahh over her work. She’s awkward at first, but after a while, she’s got a little crowd, all asking her questions. He smiles, taking a picture of her, and then, because he can’t help himself, he snaps one of Danny’s drawing and texts it to him. 

“WTF? Is this in the museum of serial killer shit?” is what he gets back instantaneously. Followed up with, “What serial killers have we come across on the mainland?” 

Steve texts him, “My sister, apparently.” 

The three dots appear and reappear a bunch of times like Danny is at a loss for words. Checking that Mary is safely ensconced with other artists and wellwishers, still explaining her process, he decides to put Danny out of his misery. He thumbs the call button as he steps outside into the cool night air. Yet another strike against Southern California. It gets fucking cold at night.

☂

Danny

He’d been playing catch with Eddie in the yard when his phone had buzzed in his pocket. It was Steve and not work, for which he was immensely grateful. He was starting to feel a little burnt out. It occurred to him briefly that maybe he should stop being so quick to respond, and impose a little emotional distance. Danny was a talker, it was how he processed, and he wasn’t sure if they could weather such a revelation. Steve didn’t need that burden. But he was weak, he’d folded and texted immediately.

As he’s composing a third one, the phone lights up in his hand. Danny doesn’t think twice before he presses the answer button. Maybe it would be wiser to impose that emotional distance. If he knew how, maybe he would, but, he thinks, he doesn’t even want to. 

“I have questions,” he says into the receiver. “Many, many questions.” 

“My sister’s displaying some work tonight,” Steve explains. “You’re the star of the show.” 

He’d looked at the picture when Steve sent it and couldn’t deny that it was his face, but he also didn’t recognize himself at all. There was a softness to him that he’d never seen when he looked in the mirror and she’d made him more good-looking than he actually was. 

“That’s not true,” Steve says, and Danny has to close his eyes. He misses Steve with every atom in his body that isn’t tied up with missing his kids. There’s a lot of missing in Danny’s life, but it was much easier to deal with when Steve was still here. Danny would resurrect that horrible couch and sleep on it willingly every single night for the rest of his life if he could have that back. 

“What? Are you really trying to debate me about my own face?” he demands. 

“That you don’t look like that,” Steve clarifies. “You do.” 

All Danny has is the eternally brilliant, “...Huh?” 

“When your lips aren’t flapping, that is. She got that wrong. I’ll tell her to draw your mouth wide open in her next draft.” 

Danny scoffs. “You, my friend, are just jealous you’re not the main attraction.”

“Hey, there’s a drawing of me too, you know!” 

“Is it as big as mine?” Danny asks without thinking. Once he hears what it sounds like coming out of his mouth he wants to smack himself in the face. 

“Well, Danno,” Steve says, falsely prim, “I have firsthand experience that it’s not the size, but how you use it.” 

Danny knows Steve is just joking back with him, and he should be glad that Steve feels comfortable enough to make jokes about having anal sex, but somehow his inability to keep his mouth shut has him spitting out, “I had a dream about you.” 

“Hmm?” 

“A sex dream. About you, that is, well us. Together.” 

There’s a long pause at the end of the line so quiet that Danny can hear the cars passing by at Steve’s location. That, he thinks, is not good, and seriously considers hanging up. It was not kosher, he should’ve known, Steve’s trying to get better. Danny wants him to come home, so of course he has to go and ruin it. 

Just when Danny feels like he’s about to explode, Steve, who is a little hoarse, says, “What were we doing in this dream?” 

Danny can’t do this out here in the yard. He needs to be indoors, where Steve’s neighbors won’t hear Danny’s dirty fantasies.

“You still there, Danno?” Steve asks as he hustles over the threshold. 

“Still here,” Danny answers, very nearly throwing himself on the new sofa sectional, and hoping Steve won’t hear the thump, and just _know_ how gone Danny is for him. “There’s been more than one.” 

Steve sucks in a breath. “Yeah?” 

“We, uh,” he hesitates. He’s always been awkward at phone sex, and he may not know what this is, but it sure sounds like phone sex. “We kiss a lot.” 

Steve hums. 

“You’re good at it,” Danny says, before clearing his throat, “better, probably, than you are in real life.” 

“I dunno about that,” Steve says with a low laugh. “Never had any complaints.” 

“That’s what all good looking people think,” Danny says, somewhat irascible. 

“Implicating yourself there,” Steve teases. 

“I’m good at kissing,” Danny insists, even as the compliment warms him up. “I like it a lot, so it’s worth being good at.” 

“So noted, good kissing, what next?” 

“It gets kinda blurry,” Danny confesses, “but, in the one I remember best, I asked you to let me fuck you.” 

“And what did I do?” 

“You let me,” Danny says, aware now of how his cock is starting to swell behind his zipper. He drops his palm to his belly, resting it there, even though he wants to drop it down those last few inches, but for all this conversation is crossing lines, that feels like a bridge too far. 

“How?” Steve asks. 

“How? What do you mean, how? It’s my dream. I can make it with people in my own subconscious, thank you very much.” 

Steve snickers at him. “I meant how do you fuck me.” 

“Ah,” Danny says, because he’s a little embarrassed, but also that sentence, those five words in Steve’s voice will be seared onto his memory for years to come. His mouth is dry and he has to swallow twice before answering. “Missionary.” 

“Always a classic,” Steve replies. 

“But I’ve fucked you through one orgasm, holding you down to the bed, and I’m still going.” 

The veneer of cool Steve’s been using through this whole conversation melts away. “Shit, Danny.” 

“Too much?” Danny asks. 

Steve murmurs something that Danny assumes means no, before saying, “Isn’t that what they say? Too much is not enough?” 

“That’s what _you_ say, maybe, because you’re a crazy person.” 

“Well it seems your unconscious mind wants to give me what I want,” Steve shoots back. 

And Danny smiles. He’s horny and tired and heartsore, and they’re doing this weird phone sex thing that may turn out to be deeply regrettable, but also it’s so good to have this give and take back. “Figures, since that’s what I usually do,” Danny says pointedly, “but it’s not just for you, because you feel amazing, and I don’t ever want it to end.” 

“And then?” 

“And then,” Danny sighs and runs his hand through his hair. “I wake up with a hard-on.” He pauses again and then goes for the gold. “Which I take care of in your shower, thinking about you the whole fucking time, missing you and wondering what you’re actually like in bed.” 

“One sec,” Steve says quickly, and then there’s the sound of a phone being fumbled around, like Steve stuck it back into his pocket. Definitely not the response anybody wants to get to saying they were actively thinking about screwing your brains out. He stares at his ceiling, frozen in place by anxiety, and berating himself for ever opening his mouth. “Danny? Danny? You still there?” 

“Yes,” he says before his brain fully engages with what’s happening. Steve must’ve been repeating his name for a while. “Sorry, sorry, yes.” 

“That was Mary,” Steve says. “She’s going to go out with some friends.” 

“And what are you gonna do?” Danny asks, adopting Steve’s tone from earlier even though he’s honestly scared shitless. 

“I am going to get the car keys, go home, and when I get there, I’m going to call you back, because this is not finished.” And then, like the cruel bastard he is, he hangs up.

☂

Steve

Pulse whirring uncomfortably fast as he fumbles to adjust the seat in Mary’s tiny economy car, he keeps asking himself what the fuck he thinks he’s doing. A smarter man would probably pump the metaphorical breaks. If Danny wants to explore a side of himself he never thought about until they talked about it, Steve gets that, respects it even. But it might actually kill him to go through this if that’s all it is. Then again, it might kill him to walk away from it too. It takes a lot of reminding himself that Danny is cautious to a fault, and definitely would not tell Steve that he wanted to fuck him on a whim.

Regardless of what is or isn’t going through Danny’s head, Steve’s impressed. Danny’s not a prude, but he is very buttoned up. Losing the tie was pretty much the only concession he was willing to make. And yeah, the conversation was pretty vanilla, but what Danny said about fucking him through an orgasm had very nearly ended Steve. He counts himself lucky he had a jacket to hold in front of his waist area when Mary came bursting out of the building with all her friends, calling his name. Although that was also strangely fortuitous, because whatever this is, it probably shouldn’t happen in a parking lot. 

Driving back on the 134, he very nearly breaks the sound barrier, hoping against hope that the short break isn’t completely ruining the moment. Traffic is kind to him and it takes under thirty minutes to pull up into the driveway, get himself out of the car, and then up the stairs to the room that’s nominally his. It used to be Deb’s sewing room and it’s very frilly and pink and the few personal effects he brought look hilariously out of place. He pulls his phone out and hits redial on the most recent outgoing call emblazoned with Danny’s name, and then flops down onto his bed, trying to slow his breathing to normal so he won’t sound like a complete creep when Danny picks up.

“Christ,” Danny answers the phone with a laugh. “Should I check the news to see if you killed anybody on the highway?” 

Steve doesn’t point out that it hadn’t even got through a full ring before Danny picked up. He sounds like plain old Danny, but Steve hears the nerves underneath it. It perversely settles something inside Steve. Nervous means Danny has something on the line here. 

“I just threatened to shoot anybody who got in my way,” Steve jokes, because he wants to ease Danny into this, the same way he’d had to ease Danny into surfing. Run at him fullbore, and Danny would likely shut down. Despite what Danny believes, he does have some modicum of people skills, and he’s definitely a thousand times more relaxed than Danny is. Here, now, ever, always.

“So…?” Danny says. 

“Where are you?” Steve asks, settling himself back in against the frilly pink sheets. 

“On the couch,” Danny says. “And before you ask, no I won’t tell you what I’m wearing.” 

Steve holds back a laugh. God, he really is green. “That’s fine, I know what you’re wearing.” 

“Is that so, genius?”

“It’s Saturday, which means jeans and a t-shirt, probably black, and no shoes, because you’re on the couch and we all know how you feel about shoes on the couch.” 

“Steve,” Danny says, sounding like he’s on his way to panic and that is not what Steve wants at all. 

“Can you do me a favor?” Steve asks. Before Danny can start in on a rant about doing favors, which probably would settle his nerves, but also wouldn’t exactly advance Steve’s cause here, he rushes on to say, “Can you touch yourself? Use your palm. Just over the jeans to start.” 

“I—yeah, okay,” Danny says, and then there’s a quiet indrawn breath. Steve smiles. Danny’s responsive, he always thought he would be. 

“Now imagine that’s my hand,” Steve instructs. “And I’m going slow.” 

“Didn’t know you came with a slow mode,” Danny replies, breathless. There’s a soft rustling noise, like he’s shifting a little on the sofa, maybe rocking up into the pressure of his hand. 

“Oh, I can do slow,” Steve says. “I can do very slow.” 

“Can you uh, can you touch yourself too?” Danny asks, slightly tongue-tied in that way he gets when his brain is working even faster than his mouth. “So that it’s not just me?” 

“Mmhm,” Steve says, obligingly dropping his hand down to his cock, squeezing more than stroking, because 1) Steve refuses to blow in his pants, and that’s been looking like a real possibility since Danny brought up this dream of his, and 2) he wants to be able to devote his full focus to Danny right now, because who knows if this will ever happen again. “But I’ve fucked my fist thinking of you for a long time.” 

“Yeah? How long?” and the way Danny says it, with his voice rising in pitch like his hand feels really good, makes Steve bite at his lip and squeeze himself a little tighter. 

“Years,” he says plainly, because they’re already here, and fuck it, he might as well get it all out there. “I have imagined having you across every surface of that house, in every possible position I could conceive of.” 

Finding his footing a little, Danny lets out a throaty chuckle. “I’ve been doing some redecorating since you left. I’ll send you some pictures so you can imagine all over again.” 

Even as he files that comment away, Steve can’t stop himself from asking, “What fresh hell will I be returning to this time?” 

“Okay, that was one time,” Danny says, voice evening out like he’s stopped rubbing himself, “and every little thing that was possible to go wrong had gone wrong all at once.” 

“I think this is the part where I would kiss you to shut you up.”

“Ha, good one,” Danny says, “but just so you know, if your plan is to have me rub one out in my jeans I will be extremely disappointed in you.” 

“Are you that close?” he says, like he’s not fighting for dear life to stave off the inevitable, himself. He thanks every god he knows of and then some for the years of training under pressure. 

Danny snorts. “I’ve been close since you asked me what my dream was about.” 

Squeezing his eyes shut, he thinks ‘god help me,’ because he knows now this one time absolutely won’t be enough. 

“You can take your cock out,” Steve says, knowing he sounds a little breathless himself now. “I’d probably use my mouth on you first.” 

“Am I expected to blow myself here?” Danny asks, skeptically. “Because I don’t know what they train you boys to do, but I do not have the lower back flexibility for that.” 

“You’ll just have to imagine,” Steve says, although the urge to derail yet again with a comeback is hard to resist. But then also: “You seem like you’d like it really wet on the head, soft pressure to start.” Danny outright moans and it seems so hungry that something in Steve’s belly swoops, “And…” he trails off, gripping his cock even harder. 

“...And?” Danny presses, and Steve realizes he’s still waiting for his next instruction. 

“You’re a gentleman, aren’t you, wouldn’t even have to hold your hips down,” Steve tells him, switching tacks, “I think you fuck how you fight—methodical, no wasted moves, under a tight leash.” 

“Tha—that sounds more like you,” Danny says, taking deep breaths in and out. Steve would bet every cent he has that Danny’s got his hands fisted at his side. Patient. 

“No, I fight to kill,” he corrects, “I always have to remind myself not to take the last step. No mercy.” 

“Kinda like right now, you mean?” Danny huffs, “and if you think I don’t know what you’re doing—”

“Then let go, do it,” Steve says gently, “you don’t have to listen to me.” 

Danny growls, stubborn to the end. “If you don’t tell me what to do next, I will drive the Marquis into the ocean at the next available opportunity.” 

“No you won’t, then you’d have to actually get in the Marquis,” Steve finds himself grinning up at the ceiling, barely able to contain himself. This is what he always hoped sex with Danny would be like. He relents, “Okay, but now you’ve gotta help me out a little. Are you circumcised?”

There’s some unintelligible muttering on the other end of the line, and then finally, “Oh, you’re worried about chafing? How incredibly sweet!” 

Steve shifts a little on the bed, already knowing what he’s going to say next is going to set Danny. “If you’ve been redecorating, you kinda screwed with my game plan.” 

“What, how?” Danny says, sounding indignant now. 

“There was a bottle of lube under the couch cushions,” Steve says, “and from the sound of it, whatever you’re on is way too quiet to be that old couch.” 

Danny groans. “You let my kids sit on that couch?” 

“I wasn’t having wild orgies on it, promise.” He hopes his eye roll can be heard all the way on Piikoi street. 

“That would’ve been the most uncomfortable orgy known to man,” Danny doubles down. “But now I feel like I’m just shooting myself in the foot by prolonging this discussion of your disgusting sex couch. And I can hear you over there, trying not to laugh, you’re not as stealthy as you think.” 

Steve stays quiet, waiting to see if a rant will follow, genuinely curious if Danny will choose winning an argument, or an orgasm. 

“I’m cut, but,” Danny says, opting for the orgasm. “I’ve got enough pre-come here from your prolonged torture, I won’t need lube.” Steve jerks involuntarily on the bed, and he must make some kind of sound, because Danny’s voice is soft and a little wondering, as he asks, “That gets you hot, huh?” 

“All of you gets me hot,” Steve tells him. “Jack it, but slowly.” 

Steve figures when he can’t hear anything that he listened. Seconds later, the noise of relief that Danny makes in the back of his throat confirms it. 

“Steve, you better get your dick out, and start stroking, because I am not gonna be the only one sounding like an idiot on the phone.” 

“You don’t sound like an idiot,” Steve says, “but for you…”

He drags his zipper down and pushes his boxers down below his balls. Steve’s cut also, but not nearly as wet as Danny, so he gives his palm a lick before dragging it over the glans. 

In mere blinks of an eye, Danny turns the tables on him, “If I fuck like I fight, here’s one for you, I am gonna take you apart piece by piece for this, and I won’t stop until you physically can’t anymore.” 

Steve shoves his hips up hard into the circle of fingers, fingers closing around the phone like he can anchor himself to Danny with it. “That a promise?” 

“Yes, it is, because you’re gonna come home to me,” Danny says, and now Steve hears the wet slick sounds of Danny’s grip on his cock and knows he’s sped up. “Because I never should’ve let you leave here without me.” 

“Danny!” and it sounds sharp, but only because he went from running at about 2000 RPMS to full throttle just from that. 

“And the only reason,” Danny’s speech has gone gratifyingly choppy, “the only reason I’m not killing you for putting us both through this hell, is because I’m a fucking idiot, okay?” 

Steve lets out a broken sob, and then he’s arching off the mattress, and coming. There’s a part of him that wants to cry, because he can’t quite believe what Danny’s saying. He’s wanted it too long and too badly for it to be real. But hasn’t Danny always come through for him? No questions asked? 

“Fuck,” Danny mutters, his hand speeding up. “almost.” 

His moans now sound almost like he’s in distress, and something about it makes everything snap together in his head, it’s like the calm he always gets before he does something dangerous. He’s made no bones about being an adrenaline junky. If he can halo jump from a plane, he can fucking well do this. 

“Shh, I’ll get you there,” Steve says and Danny makes a noise like he’s been punched, his breaths coming out in sharp heaving gasps now. “Give it up for me.” 

And Danny does, going muffled at the end there, like he’s biting his fist to keep quiet, and Steve wishes he could see it. He feels the miles between them every day, and right now is no different. 

“Shoulda facetimed it,” he says absently, reaching for the issues on his nightstand to clean up his own mess, which unfortunately for him, was mostly over his shirt. 

“There’s no way,” Danny says groggily when he comes back online. Which true to form, is pretty quick. “That I could’ve done that.” Another short pause like he’s still catching his breath. “Over facetime.” 

“We can work toward it,” Steve tells him, because he can never help poking him. 

“Sweet lord,” Danny says, “I do not know how I’ve survived you this long.” 

“Take it as a sign of your own resilience,” Steve offers.

“It’s been worth it, babe,” Danny says. 

“If this is what you’re like every time you come I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to let you out of the house,” Steve says. 

“Well, you’ve got your orders,” Danny tells him. 

“Solid copy.”

☂

Danny

“Why is it taking so long?” Charlie asks him, shifting from foot to foot. His son is not good at waiting. He understands the sentiment, because while he would normally consider himself pretty patient, the two weeks since he told Steve to come home felt interminable.

“I dunno, Buddy, it might be taking them a while to deplane,” Danny says. “Just a little longer, okay?”

“What if Uncle Steve is doing something dangerous and we have to wait _forever_?” Charlie huffs and Danny has to press his lips together not to laugh. He had been so excited, near fully dressed by the time Danny went to wake him, like he hadn’t slept a wink out of excitement, and now they were standing in the arrivals lobby with nothing interesting to do. 

When he told 5-0 that Steve was taking the red-eye and coming in at 6 AM and Danny was picking him up, he’d been helpless to stop them from coming with him, and then it felt like it was sort of a thing, so he’d put the word out to all their friends, some of whom had never gotten the chance to say goodbye to Steve before he left. Once it had ballooned, he’d asked if Charlie thought he’d be able to get up early enough to come, and he’d insisted he could and would do his best to not be cranky. 

“Hey, Charlie, wanna come with me to the Starbucks?” Nahele asks, shooting Danny a wink over his head. 

“Can I get a Frappuccino?” Charlie asks him. 

“Let’s find out,” Nahele says and looks at Danny askance. 

“That’s fine, just no caffeine,” he says and reaches for his wallet before Nahele can wave him off. He mouths, ‘Thanks,’ where Charlie can’t see. 

“You know, give him a couple more years and your kid will be as tall as you,” Lou tells him. Danny rolls his eyes. They all know Charlie’s going to be taller than him. He’s just glad his daughter topped out at 5’3. It would be a lot harder to lay down the law with her if he had to look up into her eyes. 

“You nervous?” Tani asks. 

“No, I’m not nervous,” he replies, “why would I be nervous?” 

“You’ve been kinda quiet,” she says, “you know, for you.” 

Everybody laughs. 

“Christ,” he says, dragging a hand over his face. “Can I fire myself as your boss? I’m firing myself.” 

The early morning ribbing is more than worth it though when Steve comes into view, bag thrown over his shoulder, looking like a long tall drink of water in his t-shirt, jeans, and boots. He hasn’t caught sight of them yet, because he’s looking down at his phone, and when Danny’s hip buzzes, he knows exactly who the text is from. 

“Uncle Steve,” Charlie yells, and Steve finally looks up. 

Having to share him with anybody else right now is more than worth it when Steve sees all of them: Danny, Tani, Junior, Lou, Adam, Quinn, and Lincoln. But also Noelani, Jerry, Eric, Duke, Pua, Ellie, Kawika, Odell, Hirsch, Mamo, Nahele, Kamekona, and Flippa. He wants Steve to know that he doesn’t lack for family, and there are plenty of people who’d be his support, if he’d let them. The look on his face is stunned, and he ducks his head like a shy little boy when they all shout, “Surprise!” 

Then Charlie’s running at him, a Frappuccino clutched in his hand, and all Danny can hope is that it doesn’t end in a major accident all over Steve’s unfortunately white shirt. But it’s fine, because Steve drops his bag, and takes a knee, so that he’s at eye level when Charlie runs into his arms. 

They hug for a moment and then Charlie’s saying something to him and Steve’s cupping his chin and replying, but he’s too far for any of them to hear. Finally Steve grabs his bag and gets up onto his feet, holding his hand out so Charlie can take it as they walk back over. 

Steve looks amazing, tan as ever, rested, and like he’s bulked back up a little so his clothes don’t hang on him, and it takes everything Danny has not to leap over everybody else to get to him. 

“You guys,” Steve says. “You shouldn’t have—” 

“Whatever you’re gonna say about how you don’t deserve this, shut it,” Lou says, and then everybody’s descending on him to give him hugs, asking him about LA and his time in King’s Canyon, and if he’s managed to refrain from shooting anybody these last six months. 

He catches Danny’s eyes in the middle of being buffeted by Jerry’s questions about California’s Water Wars, the meaning and intent in his gaze clear, and now Danny deeply regrets organizing a trip to their old restaurant for them to celebrate over breakfast. The urge to hold Steve close and never let go thrums through him so insistently it almost hurts. 

They spill outside and across the lanes of traffic amidst the tour and hotel busses. They probably look like the most annoying and bizarre group of tourists. It doesn’t help that their ride is a white double decker emblazoned with Kamekona’s face and the words ‘Party Bus’ surrounded with confetti decals. 

“New side venture?” Steve asks. 

“Gotta keep diversifying and looking for new revenue streams,” Kamekona replies, like always. 

And when they finally get everybody wrangled onto the bus, Steve drags him into the seat next to him. 

“Thank you,” he whispers into his ear, and Danny doesn’t think he imagines Steve’s lips brushing across the lobe as he pulls away.

☂

Breakfast wound up going until 10 am, which had been torturous, sitting next Steve, who’d leaned casually back in his chair, arm across the back of Danny’s, his jeans tight on his thighs. Everytime Steve moved, laughed, shifted in his seat, their bodies had brushed together. And he knew it had to be on purpose, from the way Steve’s knee rested against his under the table, like he had the perfect right to be in Danny’s space, making him all flustered. He was pretty sure that anybody over the age of Charlie, read: everybody, had noticed. His son had been cheerfully oblivious, pelting Steve with questions, and explaining every episode of Glitch Techs until Tani had taken pity on them and asked Charlie to come play Uno with her and Junior. He had no clue where the deck came from, but he was deeply grateful.

Danny had tossed Steve the keys when they left the restaurant to drop Charlie off at Rachel’s, and profoundly regrets it now they’re alone. At least then it would’ve forced him to watch the road and not stare at the way Steve’s jeans frame his package. 

“Did Mary tell you you couldn’t hang around her kid looking like a back country survivalist?” he asks, because when Steve was in NorCal he’d grown his beard out. He’d looked like some kind of insane mountain man in all the pictures he’d texted, but he’s clean shaven again. 

Steve snorts. “I should’ve shaved out on the river?” 

“I’m just saying, there’s a high probability you would’ve given Joanie nightmares,” Danny shoots back.” 

“It was for warmth!” 

“Get a blanket!” 

“I did, for my face,” Steve says. “It’s called a beard.” 

“It’s called,” Danny says, deliberately giving the words obnoxious emphasis, “a scraggly horror.” 

“Can you not grow one?” Steve asks, darting a narrow-eyed look over. “Is that what’s going on here?” 

“I can grow a beard,” Danny replies, “It’s a matter of choice and aesthetics, of which I have some sense. Unlike you.” 

It feels so good to back in their normal rhythm, he can’t contain the grin that would help him maintain the facade of an actual argument. 

They pull up at a light, and Steve’s hand flexes on the steering wheel. “Is that why you can’t stop looking at my lap?” 

When he turns his head to catch Danny’s gaze, there’s an expression on his face he’s never seen before. There’s mischief in it, but the way Steve’s lips are parted, tongue pressed up behind his teeth like he’s imagining doing unspeakable things to Danny is pure porn. It makes him suck in a breath. For once he’s hanging onto the ‘oh shit’ handle on the door for reasons besides Steve’s horrible driving. 

They’re so caught up in this single fraught moment that when the light changes, neither of them notice until the car behind them starts honking. Steve directs his eyes back to the road, and Danny lets out a long slow breath. 

“I, uh, Eddie’s at the Grovers for the weekend,” Danny says, fighting to keep his voice even. “We can grab him if you want, but I thought—”

“Some things,” Steve says, “can wait.”

☂

Steve

Danny warned him he’d made some changes, but he almost drives past his own house, it looks that different. The exterior siding is new along with the reshingled roof. The sagging porch columns have also been replaced but not yet painted. And the changes don’t stop there. Once inside, he drops his bag in wonder, staring around at the late morning sun spilling in from skylights and new bay windows. Danny’s familiar furniture sits where the old leather sofa and La-Z-Boy used to be, and there are new pictures on the walls. Moving from room to room, with Danny trailing behind him, Steve takes it all in. This, he thinks, is a bigger declaration than anything Danny said on the phone.

When he reaches the kitchen, Danny says, “All of the old furniture is in storage. If you don’t like it we can put it all back.” 

“No,” Steve says, turning around to face him. 

“No?” Danny asks, worrying at his lower lip with his teeth. 

“No,” Steve repeats, stepping in close. He gives Danny time to bolt, but Danny stays put, bright blue eyes holding his gaze. When Steve leans in to close the distance between them, Danny’s eyes slide closed and he tilts his chin up to meet him halfway. A sweet shock of sensation Steve can’t put words to runs through him. It’s real, all of this is real. For the past two weeks, he’s been wondering when he was going to wake up to find it was all a dream. But his brain couldn’t supply details like the scent of Danny’s aftershave mixed with the mint gum he was chewing, or the rasp of Steve’s calloused palms over fabric as he grips Danny’s narrow hips. 

It’s gentle. Steve brushes his lips over Danny’s, once, twice, learning the shape and feel of them, waiting for Danny, who’s new to this, to deepen it. It only takes a moment, his lips parting softly against Steve’s. Fuck, _this_ is a kiss, Steve thinks as Danny’s tongue flickers out like a tease before he changes the angle, reaching out to draw Steve in even closer with a hand at the back of his neck. It feels like that first deep breath when you surface from under the water, a life-giving rush. 

Before he knows it he’s walking Danny back into the counter, crowding against his body so close he feels the slow steady thump of Danny’s heart. He eases a thigh between Danny’s legs, pushing at the beginning swell of an erection, and Danny breaks the kiss, to press their foreheads together. 

“Okay?” Steve whispers. 

Danny nods, his eyes squeezed shut tight, breaths rushing past his lips in soft pants. Steve wraps his arms fully around Danny’s waist, pulling him up into Steve’s body. 

“Do you know what Charlie said to me?” he asks, sweeping his lips across Danny’s eyelids. 

Danny mutely shakes his head. 

Steve presses another kiss to the hinge of his jaw. “He said I wasn’t allowed to leave again.” Danny still won’t open his eyes, even as Steve strokes a thumb across the delicate skin below them. “I promised I wouldn’t.” 

“Please,” Danny says, shuddering against him. 

“I won’t leave,” Steve says, brushing their noses together. “Not without you.” 

Danny exhales in a rush. They stand like that for a long moment, pressed together, breaths synching up, and Steve can’t recall a moment in his life better than this. 

“I love you,” Steve says. “And you don’t need to say it, the house tells me more than enough.” 

“You like it?” Danny asks, like he already knows the answer, but wants to hear the words anyway. 

“I do. Very much.” 

Danny kisses him again quickly and then pulls back to meet Steve’s gaze. “Wanna see the bedroom?”

☂

Danny

Danny curses, lifting his arm across his face as Steve rubs precome and his own spit over the head of Danny’s cock, pausing to brush over and over the sensitive frenulum. He _is_ a gentleman, but it’s getting increasingly hard not to thrust his hips upwards.

He sinks his teeth into the knob of his wrist to muffle a moan as Steve does it to him again, right before he drags his palm down the shaft and back up. 

“I knew you did that,” Steve says. “Could just picture it every time you were getting close on the phone.” 

Danny doesn’t answer. He’s not particularly verbose during sex when he can use his mouth for better things, but right now as Steve squeezes his thumb and forefinger in a loop just under the corona, he couldn’t summon up words if he wanted to. 

“Knew you’d be big here,” Steve murmurs, and then leans over to press a kiss to his cockhead, tongue flickering out briefly, dipping into the slit, lapping up another spurt of pre-come. 

They’d spent the past two weeks while Steve wrapped stuff up in LA having more phone sex than he’d ever had in his life. It was like the dams burst open, and he needed whatever part of Steve he could have, even if it was just his voice, telling him all the many things he’d like to do to him. It hadn’t prepared him for this moment, lying on the bed, pillows tossed to the floor, Steve braced over him and talking filth while playing with his cock. 

Danny wants to tell him to quit fooling around and just jerk it already, but as Steve rubs at the scar line and down the vein on the underside the words never come out. He should’ve known when Steve asked “Can I?” after they got naked that he would do something like this. 

“You’re so flushed,” Steve says, as he finally gives Danny what he wants, stroking up over the head and back down. “You’re a work of art, you know that?” 

“You’re just showing off right now, aren’t you?” Danny bites out, pushing himself up onto his elbows. 

Steve grins. Danny’s learned by now never to trust that expression on Steve’s face. It usually means he’s about to give Danny a heart attack by trying something epically dangerous, but Steve doesn’t give him time to protest. 

He swings a leg over Danny’s thighs so that he’s kneeling above him, and what a view. Steve didn’t give him much time to just admire him earlier. But Danny’s looking his fill now, from the cut muscular lines of his chest and belly, to the vee of his pelvic muscles drawing the eye down to the heavy cock between his thighs. Steve isn’t criminally pretty the way he used to be, but he’s still gorgeous. More important is that he looks healthy and strong. 

The straight surgical scar bisecting his torso makes him catch his breath. It reminds Danny of how many times he’s almost lost him. He reaches out and runs delicate fingertips down it, looking up to catch Steve’s lids fluttering. 

“Sensitive?” Danny asks, unable to stop his fingers dragging up and down it. Steve stills, the muscles in his abdomen going tight as his cock jumps. “Do you touch it when you jerk off?” he asks, running on an instinct. Sitting up underneath him to brush their mouths together, he whispers, “Do you think of me?” Another kiss. “How I’m always inside you?” 

Steve flattens his hand over Danny’s. “Maybe,” he says, non-committal, but his eyes give him away. 

Danny lowers himself to the mattress again, taking Steve with him. And when Steve takes both of their cocks in his hand, he doesn’t stop kissing him. Bombs could go off right now and he wouldn’t stop kissing him. And when he finally comes in the tight circle of Steve’s hand, cocks pressed obscenely together, it almost hurts, but he also doesn’t want it to stop. 

“We’ve got plenty of time, Danno,” Steve tells him, but Danny’s also thinking of all the time he missed. All the years he searched for something that was right in front of him, and he was too locked in to see it. He tips Steve over onto the mattress, getting his mouth on the scar, while Steve bucks and moans beneath him. He’s 43 and figuring out how to make love to a man. But Steve has always made it so easy. So he closes his own fist around Steve’s as it slides up and down his dick, and they bring him off together. 

☂

They laze in bed afterwards, sheets in disarray, smelling strongly of spunk. Danny feels too lazy and content to do anything about it right now though. The ceiling fan whirs above them, gentle air blowing across their naked bodies, while the curtains flutter from the open windows. This is the heaven that people are searching for when they come to these islands, Danny thinks.

“Can I ask you a question?” Steve says, meeting his eyes on the pillow they’re sharing. Or rather the one Danny rescued from the floor that Steve’s also helped himself to. Typical. Not that Danny can work up the irritation to do anything about it. He likes being this close, watching the colors shift in Steve’s changeable eyes. 

“Hmm?” he murmurs. 

“What did you do with my bed?” 

He assumes Steve doesn’t mean the mattress, because everything had been wrong with that pile of springs, but rather the bed frame. Aesthetically speaking, there’d been nothing wrong with the bed. It was the one piece of furniture Steve had purchased himself, and one of the first few things he’d replaced. At the time he hadn’t known why, but he’d been strangely discomfited sleeping in the bed that Steve had once shared with Catherine. He’d felt foolish about it, because he’d been working under the assumption that once Steve returned he’d be back to the guest room, which couldn’t fit a queen bed, but he’d gone ahead anyway. Now realizes he’d actually bought it with Steve in mind, as if it was a foregone conclusion they would share. The antiqued brass with the heavier industrial fittings just seemed to fit him. There was an elegance to it, and a solidity that called to him. 

“This one not to your taste?” he asks, genuinely curious, and a little nervous also. 

Steve shakes his head. “Junior was complaining about how expensive furniture was for his new apartment. Thought we could give it to him if you hadn’t junked it.” 

Danny laughs. “It’s in storage with all the rest.” 

“This was a good choice though,” Steve says, looking up at the headboard. “You’d look incredible tied to it in a zip snare.” 

“Excuse me?” Danny asks, incredulous. “Did you just threaten to tie me to this very nice bed I bought you?” 

“Why not?” Steve says, as he reaches up and grabs the top rung. “Seems sturdy enough!”

“Sturdy? Sturdy! The problem is not how—” 

Steve cuts him off with a kiss.

☂

Making sandwiches in the kitchen, side by side, in the late afternoon sun, Steve says, “I’m not coming back to 5-0.”

Danny, who was slicing tomatoes, puts the knife down carefully, and looks over at him. “Oh?” 

“I can’t do it anymore, Danny,” he says, looking out the window, like it’s hard to talk about. For Steve it probably is. He carries so much on his shoulders, Danny knows it can’t have been an easy choice to walk away for good. “I put in my separation papers just before I left.” 

“Oh,” Danny repeats, because that is a surprise. So much of Steve’s identity was wrapped up in the Navy and the SEALS. He kinda figured Steve would make a career of it like Joe. He doesn’t want to say he’s relieved or that he’s glad, but he is both of those things. He’s done with Steve taking stupid risks with his body. He remembers back to a long ago dream, shot in quarantine, picturing them with their restaurant, watching Charlie graduate from the academy. The things he’s seen, he’s not sure he wants that for Charlie anymore, and they gave up the restaurant. “What will you do then?”

Steve shrugs. “When I started going to group, I really had no clue what it was like, or what I was gonna see there. I knew how underserved veterans were, but I didn’t _know_. As a career officer you’re kind of insulated from that stuff.” 

Danny nods, urging him to continue. 

“I’ve got an interview with FEMA to head up their Veterans Program for Region 9 in two weeks.” 

“Steve, that’s huge,” Danny says. “Region 9 is what? Hawaii and the west coast?” 

“Yeah, there’ll be some travel if I get it. I’ve never actually had a job interview before,” Steve says. “So we’ll see how that goes.” 

“You’re gonna do great,” Danny assures him and goes back to chopping the tomato. “I guess this is when I tell you I hate running 5-0.” 

Steve laughs. “I thought you hated everything about 5-0. You only told me that every day for the last ten years.” 

“Okay, but I especially hate running 5-0. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do yet, but I’m tired of getting shot at,” Danny tells him. “Sometimes I feel like every part of my body aches.” 

“We’ll figure it out,” Steve tells him.

☂

Steve

Steve jerks awake in the middle of the night, breathing hard, terrified. He dreamed he didn’t get to the house in time and Danny bled out lying in the doorway, only steps away from freedom, all because Steve has a target on his head, and they’re forever willing to get to him through the people he loves.

“Wassa matter?” Danny asks, rolling over with a big yawn. His hair is charmingly messy and his eyes are hazy like he’s only half in and out of sleep. 

“Nothing,” Steve says automatically. “Go back to sleep.” 

Danny stretches luxuriously under the sheets with a jaw cracking yawn and then says, “Well that’s obviously bullshit.” 

Steve sighs, because he can already tell from the mulish expression on Danny’s face he’s not going to let it go, and he can either give in now, or face a full on tactical campaign determined to draw Steve out. “You just—I just—I didn’t get there in time.” 

“Hey, hey,” Danny says, sitting up, “Don’t do that.” 

He wraps an arm around Steve’s middle and draws him back down to the bed. Steve can’t help reaching up to trace over the bullet’s entry scar. 

“Not even the worst I’ve had, since I met you,” Danny mumbles, eyes already dropping closed. Steve listens to the sound of his breathing, and slowly drifts back to sleep.

☂

Danny

Over the years, he’s watched Steve emerge from the water like some kind of greek sea god many, many times. It feels different now that he understands why he always found it so affecting. Steve catches sight of him waiting on the shore and grins.

“You sure you don’t want to come in?” he calls. 

“Ugh,” Danny says, but he’s thinking back to that dream of standing with him in the water, where it felt like the entire world had narrowed down to the two of them, and he finds himself wading in, even though he’s in khaki shorts and a t-shirt. Steve meets him before it’s up past his shins, and pulls him in, soaking the front of Danny’s clothes. Danny rolls his eyes. “You animal.” 

“Good morning,” Steve says, holding him close. 

Danny thinks he never, ever expected his life to look like this, but what a fucking gift he’s been given, and he clutches him closer still. 

“Love you,” he says, pressing a peck to the saltwater skin at Steve’s throat. 

There’s a reverence in Steve’s eyes, when he replies, “I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to see some of the inspiration for Danny's redecorating, I totally made [a pinterest board.](https://www.pinterest.com/stolenbytigers/built-for-tough-battles/)
> 
> I'm also sorry I didn't manage to work Kono into the narrative at the end there. Or Max. I thought about what I would've wanted if we'd gotten a proper end to the show, and it would've been a lot of our old favs returning to say goodbye.
> 
> I don't tumbl anymore, but you can find me on le twitter [here](https://twitter.com/fourfreedoms_)


End file.
